Harry Garuba is the Head of Department and Associate Professor in the Centre for African Studies. His teaching interests include: African Literature; Postcolonial Theory and Criticism; African Modernities; and Intellectuals/Intellectual Traditions of African nationalist writing. In addition to being an author and poet, he is a member of the editorial advisory board of the Heinemann African Writers Series and one of the editors of the newly established electronic journal Postcolonial Text. He has an active interest in African and postcolonial literatures and has published a volume of poetry Shadow and Dream & Other Poems, and has edited another, Voices from the Fringe. His recent publications have explored questions of mapping, space and subjectivity within a colonial and postcolonial context and issues of modernity and local agency, especially the nature and form of African inflections of the modern.

Imraan Coovadia was born in Durban, educated at Yale and is now at the University of Cape Town. He is the author of three novels – The Wedding, Green-Eyed Thieves and High Low In-between and has written for N+1, Threepenny Review, The Sunday Independent, The Hindu, Bombay Gin, Baobab, Boston Herald and Politikan.

Isobel Dixon is a poet and literary agent. She has worked at the Blake Friedmann Literary Agency in London for 15 years, where she represents many prominent South African writers. Her first collection Weather Eye won the Sanlam and Olive Schreiner prizes. Her latest collection is A Fold in the Map. She has also translated two of Marita van der Vyver’s novels from Afrikaans..

Ivan Vladislavić, born in Pretoria in 1957, has lived in Johannesburg since the mid-seventies. He has published five books of fiction: Missing Persons, The Folly, Propaganda by Monuments and Other Stories, The Restless Supermarket and The Exploded View.  The recently published Flashback Hotel combines Missing Persons and Propaganda by Monuments. The non-fiction Portrait With Keys(2006) is a chain of lyrical texts about Johannesburg that can be read in different ways.His work has won the Olive Schreiner Prize, the CNA Award and the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, and has been translated into several languages. As an editor, Ivan has worked with many of SA’s major writers. He co-edited blank_Architecture, apartheid and after  with Hilton Judin and edited T’kama-Adamastor, a book of essays on the monumental canvas by Cyril Coetzee. Willem Boshoff examines the work of this S African conceptual artist.

Jacob Dlamini is a 2009 Ruth First Fellow and journalist who has worked for Business Day and the Sunday Times, two of South Africa’s leading newspapers. He holds an MA in Social and Political Thought from the University of Sussex, which he obtained with merit in January 2008. He also holds a MA in African Studies which he obtained in 2005 from Yale University, where he was a Fulbright scholar. He is currently registered at Yale as a History PhD student and plans to work on the labour history of Kruger National Park.

Jann Turner was raised in the Cape and educated in Britain and America. An alumnus of NYU’s Grad Film School, she has directed multi-cam soap and single cam drama as well as co-created two successful drama series and has written numerous television scripts. She is the author of the novels Heartland, Southern Cross and The Dignity Channel. She has also made award-winning documentaries and worked for two years as part of the team of producers who made the Truth Commission Special Report. Her feature film directorial debut – White Wedding – was the South African entry for nomination in the Best Foreign Picture category at the 2010 Academy Awards. Jann is currently in post-production on her second feature film, which will be released in South Africa later this year.

John van de Ruit is an actor, playwright and author, educated at Michaelhouse and with an MA in Drama and Performance studies from The University of KwaZulu Natal. He wrote and performed in two plays, Green Mamba and Black Mamba (in collaboration with Ben Voss) which received numerous awards. His Spud novels have been a publishing phenomenon in South Africa, smashing all local publishing records; the first was awarded the Bookseller’s choice award in 2006 and along with the second, has been published in the USA and UK and translated into Italian, Russian and Portuguese. A Spud movie starring John Cleese is currently in production.

John van Zyl, a Free State Rhodes Scholar, started his academic life in the English Department at Wits and later became Head of Media Studies. In various parallel lives he was the Southern Africa Director of the Community Filmmaking Programme for the French Government, TV critic for The Star (for which he won the Pringle Prize,) scriptwriter and adult educator. After he retired from university he set up ABC Ulwazi, an NGO focused on developing the community radio sector. In 2004 he was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. At present he is nurturing Franschhoek FM Community Radio.